Bull's Eye Business Writing Tips

Thanks to reader, Yossi David, for the answer to Vianne's question in Tip #442 regarding punctuation and quotation marks.

Why does punctuation go inside quotations? An expert answers.
December 04, 2006 General
The following is an answer by Craig Smith, editor, lecturer in languages and owner of Smithcraft Press. 

The first thing to realize is that English, especially American English, is a mongrel tongue that often as not defies all logic.  It's also changing and evolving, which infuriates sticks-in-the-mud like me, who would prefer rigid rules that never vary.

Second, quotes do not always go to the right of a punctuation mark.  While it's true that commas and periods generally fall inside closing quotes, that's not the case with colons and semicolons, which always go outside quotation marks.  And question marks and exclamation points vary according to whether they are logically part of the quoted material.  For example, you'd say,

I don't believe that "might makes right."

but

Is it true that "might makes right"?

but also

The question "Does might make right?" has been debated for centuries.

Third, British English follows the more logical approach of putting all punctuation outside the quotation marks-it's only American English that is illogical.  Then again, the Brits also use single quotation marks for first-level quotes, and double quotation marks for quotes within quotes-the exact opposite of what we do in America.

Fourth, and to the heart of your question: The American convention of putting the quotes outside of commas or periods seems to be the result of historical accident.  When type was set by hand on big printing presses (some claim the practice stems from the printing practice of Ben Franklin), a period or comma outside of quotation marks at the end of a sentence tended to get knocked out of position because they were on half-size pieces of type, so the printers tucked the little devils inside the quotation marks to keep them safe and out of trouble.  And according to the FAQ file of alt.english.usage, because the type on those presses were raised bits of metal, periods and commas were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage: the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above, if they had a quotation mark on one side and a blank space on the other.

Other sources explain that typography often used a style called "hung" punctuation, in which terminal punctuation at the ends of lines of type was set outside the column margin.  As a result, the "heavy" ink (characters that take up most of the typeface's x-height) form a visually strong vertical line; this line is disrupted when "light" ink (periods and commas and other characters that use up only a tiny fraction of the line's vertical space) fall at the margin of a page.

Hence the convention arose of always putting periods and commas inside the final quotation mark regardless of logic.  In other words, it all had to do with the development of typography, not the rules of grammar or logic.

On the other hand, it's a matter of convention.  We do many things simply because they've always been done that way, not because there's a good, sensible reason for continuing to do them that way.  It's really all the fault of English teachers (like Tritt) and editors (like me), anyway.  As Dave Barry put it, "If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal."